The Gender of The War On Drugs

AN47CH20_Muehlmann ARI 24 July 2018 11:55
Annual Review of Anthropology
The Gender of the War

on Drugs
Shaylih Muehlmann
Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver,
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2018.47. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
British Columbia V6T 1A7, Canada; email: shaylih@mail.ubc.ca

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Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2018. 47:315–30 Keywords

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at war on drugs, gender, feminism, intersectionality
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https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102317- Abstract
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In this review, I explore some of the lines of inquiry that have emerged in
Copyright c 2018 by Annual Reviews. anthropology and closely related disciplines around the theme of drugs and
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gender. The critical research on drugs over the past few decades has tended to
This article is part of a special theme on Ethics. focus on how prohibition policies are racialized, which has been important
For a list of other articles in this theme, see
http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/ for revealing the injustice and racism found in drug policies and in com-
annurev-an-47-themes monsense notions about drugs and drug use. Drawing from intersectional
theorists who have long argued that racial categories are never experienced
or imposed as singular identities separate from gender, language, class, and
sexuality, I argue in this article that the literature on gender and drugs has
struggled with two main interrelated problems: determining (a) how to un-
derstand gender and race together and (b) how to theorize gender in relation
to power when these two factors are often conflated with each other in both
popular discourse and theoretical dispositions about the war on drugs.
315
Review in Advance first posted
on August 1, 2018. (Changes may
still occur before final publication.)
INTRODUCTION
The “war on drugs”1 has become, in the past several decades, one of the most important sources
of violence, militarization, conflict, and suffering all over the world. The very concept of the war
on drugs, as noted by many scholars, frames the drug problem not as a public health or education
issue but rather as a military problem, requiring state violence against groups loosely framed as
“the enemy,” which are composed of users and traffickers. The notion of the war on drugs also
creates the illusion of the neat separation between legal and illegal activities and actors, when the
fact is that drug trafficking and its resulting violence often blur the very distinction between legal
and illegal actors (Estévez 2012, Muehlmann 2013). More importantly, the militarized language of
these policies contributes to producing the violence it purportedly seeks to cease by conscripting
the public into supporting a “war” (Campbell & Herzberg 2017). This militarization has been
particularly dramatic in countries such as the United States, Mexico, Afghanistan, and, more
recently, the Philippines, where a brutal antidrug campaign waged by the state and paramilitaries
has led to the murder of thousands of alleged drug users and traffickers.
The blatant failure of the war on drugs in stopping the ever-expansive growth of drug use
and drug trafficking, and therefore the associated violence, has led in the past few years to the
rise of antiprohibition sentiments all over the world, clear in the decriminalization or legalization
of at least some drugs in countries such as Portugal, Uruguay, Canada, and many parts of the
United States. Yet the war sponsored by the state and its resulting violence continues, especially
targeting marginalized, racialized, and gendered populations. In this article, I review the literature
on the war on drugs in order to analyze how gender relations have structured this war, how state
repression has been gendered, and how it affects men and women differently. Because of the
vastness of the topic, this review will limit its geographic scope to one of the global epicenters
of prohibition policies: North America, especially the United States and Mexico. The war on
drugs has had a unique and particularly profound influence in this part of the world because the
United States has had one of the most coercive and punitive prohibition policies on record. The
militarized prohibition of certain substances called “drugs” has been one of the most dominant
doctrines guiding US domestic and foreign policy since the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon
officially launched the drug wars. In the United States, well-funded interventions and programs
ostensibly aimed at impeding the traffic and consumption of illicit drugs have profoundly shaped
systems of governance, including the prison and legal systems, health programs, and social welfare
(Bertram et al. 1996, Goffman 2015, Massing 2000, Simon 2009, Tate 2013). Simultaneously,
the United States is the main source of the demand for illegal drugs in the world; its location
in the Americas has affected the rise in narco-trafficking in neighboring Latin America, first in
Colombia and more recently in Mexico, where the drug-related violence have reached staggering
dimensions, with more than 250,000 dead and 30,000 disappeared (SESNSP 2017).
Most media representations as well as scholarly depictions of drug-related violence in North
America have been gendered, in that they focus almost exclusively on men, who are represented
as both the perpetrators and the primary victims of the violence. Such representations have over-
simplified the multidimensional nature of the violence of drug war policies and the complexity of
illegal drug use and largely obscured women’s presence and agency in these domains. In Mexico,
for instance, tens of thousands of women have been left widowed or searching for information on
their missing or murdered children, siblings, and spouses. In the United States, which has the high-
est level of incarceration in the world, women whose partners are in jail owing to drug offenses are
1
While I henceforth omit the quotation marks on this phrase, it is important to take note of the problematic nature of the
metaphor of the “war on drugs.”
316 Muehlmann
often left to raise families alone. In both the United States and Canada, women are simultaneously
becoming the fastest growing prison population, usually also as a result of drug possession or
trafficking. Thus, women are also increasingly taking a more political stance in demanding justice,
protesting the negative impacts of drug war policies, and in some cases calling for an end to the war
on drugs. The growing presence of these women in the political scene complicates and challenges
the official and media masculinization of the drug crisis. It also reveals the different ways in which
gender is constitutive of both the war on drugs and the diverse social movements opposing it.
If we conceive of gender as a social relation and as a complex entanglement of positionalities
that are never just about gender, the analysis of the gender of the war on drugs proposed in
this review necessarily examines the cocreation of normative and disruptive forms of masculinity
and femininity that involve the action and experience of women and men that are also part of
racialized and class collectives. First, I consider the man-centered focus of some of the literature,
in particular its examination of the masculinity created by drug trafficking and its criminalization
and its parallel emphasis on the racialized dimensions of the war on drugs. These dimensions, while
crucial, have partly erased the gendered nature of these policies and how they engage women. As
is shown in the next section, the gendered dimension of the war on drugs becomes clear in the
history of prohibition since the early 1900s. I subsequently analyze how scholars have examined
the gendered and racial differences in the experience of drug use and drug trafficking. In the final
sections, I discuss how to theorize power in this context, particularly in dialogue with intersectional
approaches to gender.
MASCULINITIES AND RACIALIZATION

Probably the best-known ethnography that examines how the war on drugs affects masculinity
is Bourgois’s influential In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in the Barrio, in which he analyzes
how inner-city Puerto Rican men in New York City create notions of masculine dignity around
interpersonal violence and sexual domination. Along with other scholars of masculinity, he argues
that traditional working-class patriarchy has been thrown into ideological crisis as large numbers of
men are unable to reproduce hegemonic expressions of masculinity because of the disappearance
of unionized jobs with family benefits (Bourgois 1995; see Connell 1987). The conception of
gender that emerges in this work is one that centers on a traditional Puerto Rican masculinity
compromised through the undermining of patriarchal control. This working-class masculinity is
affected by the lack of proper health care, shelter, and education. As Bourgois (1996) points out,
“[T]he particularly brutal forms” that masculinity adopts “is ultimately a reflection, not just on the
political economic model of the United States, but rather of the fundamental lack of basic human
rights among the socially marginal.”
In Mexico, scholars of the war on drugs have noticed a similar crisis of patriarchy amid
widespread poverty and inequality. Yet, masculinity has also been redefined by the rise in drug traf-
ficking and the intensification of violence (Andreas 2009; Astorga Almanza 2005; Rincón 2009;
Wright 2012, 2014). Muehlmann’s work (2013) on the experiences of low-level drug mules in
northern Mexico shows that many young men are drawn into the trade not just because of the
upward mobility it affords but also because of the allure offered by the highly masculinized and
eroticized figure of the bold narcotraficante, which makes these men more successful with women.
These ethnographic accounts from different areas of North America show how expressions of
masculinity among low-level traffickers are both instantiations of conditions of structural violence
as well as a vital and emergent force in the reproduction of this violence.
The literature on drug use has also demonstrated how gay men who challenged heteronorma-
tive notions of masculinity have been rendered a particularly vulnerable group. This vulnerability
www.annualreviews.org • The Gender of the War on Drugs 317

became apparent with the spread of AIDS in the 1980s, when it was clear that nonheteronormative
men were disproportionally affected, which also drew attention to multiply marginalized commu-
nities of urban gay men (Davies et al. 1993, Farmer et al. 1996, Patton 1985, Singer 1994). Studies
showed that the highest rates of infection were also racialized and involved intravenous drug users,
gay men, African Americans, and Latino men and women, in particular black and Latino gay men
(Singer 2001; Weeks et al. 1995, 1996).
This work on the experience of multiply marginalized communities takes us to one of the most
important contributions of the recent critical work on drug prohibition: its profoundly racial-
ized character, which tends to create suffering along racial lines. The importance of notions of
race is evident, first, in the history of racialized criminalization and mass incarceration in the
United States, which has disproportionally targeted African Americans and Latinos (Alexander
2012, Bourgois 1995, Corva 2008, Natapoff 2011, Waterston 1993). This work has also revealed
how drug-prohibition policies have essentialized racial categories and used them to differentially
distribute the damage they cause and the punishment by the state across populations. As Alexander
(2012) famously argued, “[M]ass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow,” functioning
along the same lines as slavery and demonstrating that the legal rhetoric of “colorblindness” ob-
scures a new racial caste system that is particularly harsh on African American males. Stereotypes
about race are also fundamental to how drugs themselves are popularly understood. These stereo-
types have been particularly powerful in the case of crack cocaine, which is “pharmacologically
identical” to powder cocaine (Provine 2011); the possession of crack cocaine led to much more
severe prison terms in the 1980s because it was racialized as the cheap drug of the black urban
ghetto, whereas powder cocaine was regarded as a more expensive, “whiter” drug and therefore
resulted in a lesser punishment (Hart 2013).
This attention to race and racialization has been critical to revealing the fundamental racism
of drug policies, even in their liberal incarnation under US Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack
Obama. However, as intersectional theorist Crenshaw (1991a) has long argued, racial categories
are never experienced or imposed as singular identities but exist in relationship with gender,
language, class, and sexuality. The drug war literature’s emphasis on race has, for the most part,
neglected the intersections between racialized and gendered positionings in the implementation
of drug policies and the rise in mass incarceration and political activism.
GENDERED IDEOLOGIES ON DRUGS AND WOMEN’S ACTIVISM

Placing gender, and not just masculinity, at the center of a review of the war on drugs in North
America requires deconstructing the notion of drugs in the first place. The notion of drugs is an
ideological category constituted through a set of problematic distinctions that are culturally and
historically specific. Central to the notion of drugs is the perceived distinction between “medicinal”
or authorized and “nonmedicinal” and prohibited substances that can be ingested by the human
body. There is a fundamentally gendered and racialized hierarchy to these distinctions. Work
across the social sciences and humanities has pinpointed the vacillation between the medicalization
of drugs, usually when it involves dominant groups such as white women or youth, and their parallel
criminalization, often directed toward Latino or African American men and boys (Corva 2008;
Fraser & Moore 2011; Kohler-Hausmann 2010; Netherland 2012; Schneider 2008; Singer 1995,
1996, 1999).
Kohler-Hausmann (2010) has argued that American drug policy has always counterposed
the figure of the active, masculinized drug “pusher” and that of the passive, feminized “user”
or “addict.” This gendered dichotomy has overlapped with other stratified dualisms associated
with drugs: crime versus disease, treatment versus punishment, abstinence versus maintenance,
318 Muehlmann
medicine versus drug, victim versus agent, or pleasure versus suffering (Campbell & Herzberg
2017). Many authors have shown that this official construction obscures the role that women take
up in a range of other roles within the drug industry—as traffickers (Campbell 2008, Carey 2014),
entrepreneurs (Anderson 2005), activists (Boyd & Boyd 2014, Muehlmann 2017, Tate 2015), and
even writers and producers of knowledge about drugs (Carey 2017). This gendering of drugs and
users has been challenged and redefined through activism, medicalization, and regulation as well
as through international policy and cultural transformations. But its foundational ideology, the
distinction between legal and illegal substances and the normalization of the prohibition of the
latter, leads us to the history of prohibition in the United Sates.
Current understanding of the category of drugs is inextricably bound up with the history of
prohibition in the early 1900s.2 Indeed, Levine & Reinarman (2004) argue that drug prohibition
is in fact a historical extension and continuation of alcohol prohibition. The latter is often traced
to anti-immigrant sentiments amid concerns about problem drinking among Catholic Irish and
Eastern European migrants in the United States in the early twentieth century (Burnham 1993,
Gately 2008, Lender & Martin 1987).

Prohibition policies were forged from the start through distinctly gendered activism. As Klein
(2015) argues, women’s suffrage was directly linked to the “temperance movement” that promoted
abstinence from alcoholic drinks in the United States in the 1920s, as many women fighting for
voting rights were also fighting to ban alcohol. Furthermore, women active in the temperance
movement argued that action was needed to protect families from the violence of drunken men. In
this context, the activism of these women against alcohol was a performance of feminine sobriety
and respectability (Klein 2015).
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was a major actor in framing drinking as a gen-
dered issue. Its campaigns singled out a distinct activity and group: the drinking of alcoholic
beverages by a “crowd of unwashed, unkempt, hard-looking drinking men” (Okrent 2010, p. 17).
As Okrent (2010) notes, the success of the temperance movement in establishing prohibition in
the 1920s bolstered the case for women’s suffrage because it presented women as models of good
sense and responsible citizenry. As a result of women’s visibility in the temperance movement,
much of the public assumed that women would stand united to defend prohibition against at-
tempts to terminate it in the decade following its implementation. The stereotype of total female
support for prohibition was one of the major hurdles that antiprohibitionists faced. But just as
women had played a major role in the implementation of prohibition, so too they were essential
actors in its repeal in 1933. Kyvig (1976) argues that this repeal was due largely to the efforts and
activism of large numbers of women, which coalesced in the emergence of the Women’s Orga-
nization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), which was a nationwide women’s repeal
society composed of more than one million members. As Kyvig (1976) notes, many of the women
who had originally supported prohibition gradually changed their minds. The ineffectiveness of
the law, the decline in moderate drinking, and the growing prestige of bootleggers who illegally
smuggled alcohol were major reasons for their change of heart. As one of the major female figures
of the WONPR, Pauline Morton Sabin explained that “[m]others had believed that prohibition
would eliminate the temptation of drinking from their children’s lives” but found instead that
“children are growing up with a total lack of respect for the Constitution and for the law” (quoted
in Kyvig 1976, p. 468). Spokeswomen for the WONPR argued that they were concerned about the
2
The research on pharmaceutical drugs, though beyond the scope of this review, has provided a critical comparative perspective
on the way distinctions between licit and illicit drugs are made. This literature has also revealed unique dynamics shaping the
pharmaceutical industry, including its nature as an openly commercial enterprise (Dumit 2012, Petryna 2002, Van der Geest
et al. 1996).

effects of prohibition on children and family life and were particularly distressed by the violence,
corruption, and excesses created by the banning of alcohol.
Kyvig (1976) argues that the WONPR endorsements and subsequent campaigning for the
Democrats emphasized the issue of prohibition in the 1932 election and helped associate the
Democratic party with prohibition repeal, which proved crucial for its victory. According to
Kyvig, part of the reason that the Women’s Organization so quickly slipped into oblivion despite
the success of the repeal, and was ignored henceforth by historians, was that it was overshadowed
at its moment of success by the emergence of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal
(Kyvig 1976).
Klein (2015) argues that drugs were quickly assimilated into the gendering of the temperance
movement and that the discourses forged around alcohol prohibition carried through to the
argument for drug prohibition. In fact, drug prohibition began as a subset of the constitutional
prohibition of alcohol. Levine & Reinarman (2004) explain that the first US narcotics agents were
from the federal alcohol prohibition agency. It was not until 1930 that Congress separated drug
prohibition from alcohol prohibition because of the increasing unpopularity of the latter, forming
the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (Epstein 1977, Musto 1975). Women continued supporting
prohibition policies for decades; Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” (to drugs) campaign in the 1980s
is perhaps the most famous example.
This situation has changed substantially in the past decade; growing numbers of women have
played an even more powerful role in emerging efforts to end the war on drugs in the United States,
Mexico, and beyond. The activism of black women in the United States has been particularly
important, for it has long traced the problem of drug-related violence to issues of social justice
and institutional racism rather than to drugs. Much of the focus of this activism has been police
brutality. Mothers Against Police Brutality, for instance, is an advocacy group whose mission is “to
unite mothers and families nationally who have had their children suffer injustice at the hands of
their local Police Department. We will hold law enforcement accountable. Our mission is to have
an integral role in the changes and dialogues that will protect and save lives” (Mothers Against
Police Brutality 2014).
In Latin America and especially in Mexico, women have also been at the vanguard of the
activism against drug war policies, which have had particularly violent and devastating effects on
the country. The activism of mothers who lost children to the war on drugs has been effective at
bringing attention to the way these drug policies have negatively affected ordinary people in both
the United States and Mexico. Yet, as Muehlmann (2017) notes, the kinds of maternal activism
that have emerged in both countries contrast significantly. Black women activists in the United
States have shifted the debate away from drugs and toward the conditions of structural poverty
and violence that disrupt the lives of black families. Mexican activists, in contrast, tend to present
their dead or missing relatives as innocent bystanders or collateral damage of the war on drugs,
and many are reluctant to denounce its structural dimensions. This maternal activism has also
been shaped by the religious identification and practice of these women as Catholic, as Koven &
Michel (2013) have emphasized.
GENDERED DIFFERENCES IN DRUG TRAFFICKING AND USE

The gendered dimensions of drug war policies and of the resistance to such policies are clear
in how drug use itself has been constructed. Historically, drug users were treated as a generic
category with no explicit differentiation between men and women (Campbell 2015, Ettore 2004).
But the literature has increasingly shown that men and women experience the war on drugs, the
320 Muehlmann
drug trade, and drug addiction quite differently. Most types of illegal substances violate societal
expectations of women (Bush-Baskette 2000).
Female roles in the drug economy are sexualized in ways that make women vulnerable. Based on
their fieldwork among heroin and speed addicts in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury neighborhood,
Bourgois and his colleagues (2004) suggest that young addicted women are particularly vulnerable
to the infectious diseases caused by intravenous drug use. They describe the social dynamic that
creates this vulnerability as replete with physical and sexual violence. They also point out that
the logistics of making an income on the streets lead most young homeless women to enter into
relationships with older men. Bell & Salmon (2010) note that research has shown this pattern to
be consistent and that men are more likely to finance drug use through illegal activity than are
women (Powis et al. 1996). Women are also more likely to engage in sex work to be able to buy
drugs (Maher 1997, Miller 1995).
Much of the recent work on women’s drug-related experiences has focused on their use of
drugs while pregnant or parenting. In reviewing the literature on maternal drug use, Campbell
& Herzberg (2017) noted that the studies carried out in the 1990s through the 2000s occurred
in the context of a very politicized awareness around maternal use of crack cocaine (Maher 1997,
Maher et al. 1996, Moloney et al. 2015, Sales & Murphy 2007). The blatant sexism evident in the
focus of these studies has been increasingly recognized. For instance, Campbell notes that while
the focus on substance-abusing parents centered on women, there was very little discussion on the
responsibilities of fathers who were also users or who experienced a “decline in paternal instinct’”
(Campbell 2000, p. 190). Therefore, the research emerging in the last few decades has taken a more
critical perspective, documenting gender-based civil and human rights violations of drug-using
pregnant and parenting women (Boyd 1999, 2004, 2001; Knight 2015; Malinowska-Sempruch &
Rychkova 2015; Paltrow 2013; Paltrow & Flavin 2013).
The increase in attention on women and drug use in media and official narratives, specifically
on the role of mothers, had a significant impact on the disproportionate policing and incarceration
of women. As Campbell (2000) shows, drug use was constructed as compromising the “maternal
instinct” of women in ways that bolstered support for punitive drug policies. This view also
implied that drugs were more harmful to women than they were for men. Campbell has argued
that the drug policy changes in the 1980s triggered by the crack-cocaine epidemic also brought
the narrative of “the decline of maternal instinct” to the national stage. This point in time is when
the war on drugs truly became a war on women, putting many women and especially poor women
of color under the control of the criminal justice system, especially due to random drug testing of
parolees (Campbell & Ettorre 2011, pp. 82–83; see also Campbell 2006).
Bush-Baskette (2000) argues that two specific policy initiatives are likely responsible for the
heavier impact of drug war policies on women: the penalties for the possession of small amounts
of drugs, which basically rendered users as criminally responsible as dealers, and the acts of 1986
and 1988, which established minimum sentencing mandates. As a result of the toughening of
punishment, sentencing decisions no longer took into consideration family situations, such as a
woman being the sole provider for a family (Bush-Baskette 2000, p. 993). Mothers with children
have therefore been differently affected by their incarceration. More than 70% of women who are
incarcerated have children under 18 and are their children’s main caregivers (Bush-Baskette 2000).
While drug use was clearly common among women before the war on drugs, the incarceration of
women was not. It was not until the policy shifts in the 1980s that there was a noticeable increase
in the imprisonment of women in the United States (Feinman 1994). To this day, women are the
fastest-growing prison population (Garcia 2010, Jordan-Zachery 2008), an increase inseparable
from the war on drugs.

DEBATING INTERSECTIONALITY
In terms of its effects, the war on drugs is unequivocally not only a war on African Americans,
Latinos, and the poor but also a war on women. But this war affects some women more than
others, especially poor women of color. As feminist criminologists have pointed out, drug use and
drug trafficking involve women of all backgrounds. But black, Latina, and indigenous women are
far more likely to face punitive action than are white women. For instance, in 1989, black and
white women had similar levels of drug use during pregnancy. However, black women were 10
times more likely to be reported to a child welfare agency for their drug use (Chasnoff et al. 1990).
Similarly, in Canada, First Nations women are the fastest-growing population in prison (Kilty
2014).
Jordan-Zachery (2008) compiled convincing statistics that reveal the heightened effect of puni-
tive drug policies on black women. Between 1986 and 1995, drug offenses accounted for approxi-
mately one-third of the increase in the male prison population and for one-half of the increase in
the female prison population in the United States (Mauer et al. 1999). Between 1991 and 1996,
the incarceration rate of black women increased by 82% ( Jordan-Zachery 2008).

The skewed effects of punitive drug policies on black women have begged the question of how
to understand the racialization of prohibition in tandem with forms of gender subordination. The
dominant theory for thinking about gender over the last few decades has been intersectionality,
which emphasizes that people do not experience gender in isolation from other identities, such
as class, race, disability, or sexual orientation.3 According to this view, gender, class, race, and
nationality constitute one another and are expressed in different forms of behavior and social
interrelations (Klein 2015, Yuval-Davis 2006).
It was with the black feminist movement that intersectional feminist theory was born, for
this movement had long insisted on the connections between racism and sexism (Gines 2014).4
This perspective led to important analyses by feminist scholars on how systems of oppression
based on class, racial, and gender hierarchies work together and mutually reinforce one another
(Davis 1983, hooks 1981, King 1988). Intersectionality theory has been criticized for its tendency
to reify the categories of race, gender, and class, which while viewed as intersecting with each
other are often presented as neatly distinguishable from each other (Allen 2016, Huffer 2013).
This critique is especially relevant for the work on gender and drugs, which has struggled with
the dualism between gendered experiences as imposed and as practiced. If female drug users are
defined as lacking power in the first place because of their status as women, then any analysis
of the intersection of gender with experience of class or race, for example, will necessarily be
compromised.
Another problem with intersectionality theory is its limitations for accounting for subjects that
are multiply positioned. Intersectionality is good for thinking about multiply marginalized subject
positions—black women living in poverty, for example. However, it is less useful in approaching
subject positions that are forged through privilege. Nash observed that the overwhelming majority
of intersectional scholarship has focused exclusively on “multiply marginalized subjects” (Nash
2008, p. 9). She argues that this emphasis on oppression in theories of intersectionality leads
3
The term “intersectionality” was introduced by Crenshaw (1991a,b) in the context of discussions around the limitations
of single-axis frameworks for analyzing discrimination. Instead, Crenshaw (1991b, p. 1244) argued that race and gender
“intersect” in such a way that they cannot be analyzed as separate from each other.
4
The concept of intersectionality has a complex genealogy (see Collins 2011), which draws in part from the earlier call by
socialist feminists to integrate class in the analysis of gender inequalities.
322 Muehlmann
theorists “to ignore the intimate connections between privilege and oppression.” For the literature
on drugs, this point certainly rings true and seems particularly important, given how white women
in particular may be both victimized by patriarchy in the context of drug war policy and also
privileged by race. For example, Herzberg (2006) examines how in the “valium scare” of the 1970s
middle-class women were privileged as white but also marginalized as women. The particularity
of their positioning both constrained and powerfully enabled their activism around the issue of
Valium use and ultimately rendered the Valium scare one where the American people could
sympathize and offer support for the stay-at-home moms considered “at risk.”
THE GENDERING OF STRUCTURE AND AGENCY

A challenge faced by the literature on gender and drugs is determining how to theorize the
power relations defining, and created by, gender relations. The more ethnographic literature has
been criticized for either overemphasizing the agency of women or undermining it by presenting
women as victims. For example, Campbell & Herzberg (2017) argue that this victimization of
women (Bourgois 1995, Kandall 1999) has reified gender binaries by defining its poles as the
presence or absence of power or the capacity to exercise agency. The work that has examined men’s
involvement in the drug trade has faced similar criticism. Most of this scholarship has theorized
men’s involvement in trafficking as a way of resisting and challenging mainstream white and
blue-collar work through dangerous expressions of hypermasculinity and dominance, embodied
in the accumulation of money, “respect,” and sexual conquest (Anderson 1999, Bourgois 1995,
Sanchez-Jankowski 1991).
Anderson (2005) has cautioned that a pervasive assumption in the literature on gender and
drugs is that males are the predominant actors in drug trafficking. She argues that, as a result, this
work fails to recognize how trafficking is often made possible by women’s agency and by the power
they exercise. Therefore, she argues that the kinds of power associated with men and women are
interdependent, something that is lost in accounts that define power solely as domination and
control exerted by men. Anderson shows, in particular, that women’s power in the illicit drug
economy comes from their agency in supporting roles that are in fact fundamental to the trade (see
Campbell 2008). The importance of women’s supporting roles has also been noted by Muehlmann
(2013) who describes how in northern Mexico they are often recruited for to smuggle US dollars
strapped in their bodies. In reviewing the literature, Anderson also shows that both male and
female drug users and sellers often live in households controlled predominantly by women
(Bourgois 1995; Carey 2014; Dunlap & Johnson 1996; Hamid 1990, 1992; Sterk 1999). The
evidence also suggests that it is generally grandmothers over age 65 who head these households,
especially in inner-city neighborhoods (Anderson 1999, Dunlap et al. 2000, Maher et al. 1996,
Wilson 1993). Anderson argues that such housing provisions and the unpaid labor of women are
critical to the economic and social maintenance of the illicit drug world. Similarly, Carey (2014)
documents how during prohibition in the 1920s and early 1930s, when the media focused on
high-powered men such as Al Capone, bootlegging businesses were family-run, “passed from
generation to generation, and both men and women participated in it equally” (p. 61).
This body of work, in short, has revealed the shortcomings of structuralist conceptions of
power that often emerge in feminist scholarship, which cannot account for the nuanced roles
that women play in the drug economy because such work views power as domination and as an
inherently masculinist, male-centered practice. Feminist theorists from a variety of backgrounds
have therefore proposed to understand power as a capacity or ability or, in Anderson’s case, as
“empowerment” (Held 1993, Miller 1992, Wartenberg 1990).

This emphasis on women’s empowerment in the context of drug trafficking and use has been
criticized by authors such as Maher (1997) for being equally problematic, especially for presenting
women as individual volitional actors more or less uncompromised by social constraints. From
Maher’s perspective, a focus on “empowerment,” while correcting oversimplified notions of power
as domination, risks gearing too far in the other direction by overemphasizing or romanticizing
women’s agency (see also Allen 2016). Influenced by Maher’s critique, scholars in the field of gender
and drugs have turned to performance-based notions of gender as an always-situated social action
in which women’s agency and resistance are constrained by wider social fields (Anderson et al.
2009, Evans et al. 2002, Measham 2002, Peralta et al. 2010, Sanders 2011, West & Zimmerman
1987). This work has attended to the constrained nature of women’s agency in drug settings and to
its embeddedness within discursive and material restrictions (Anderson 2008; Boeri 2013; Ettore
1992, 2004; Muehlmann 2013; Sterk 1999).
These debates about how to conceptualize women’s agency in relation to drug use and traf-
ficking and their criminalization by the state may appear to be yet another instantiation of an
enduring antinomy in the social sciences between theories that overemphasize structural con-
straints or those that highlight practice and agency. To some extent, that perception is accurate.
But part of what makes this problem unique to critical work on gender is its connection to de-
bates in the public sphere about drug policy, which draw from commonsense ideologies of gender
that, in North America, sometimes portray men and women as positioned on opposite ends of a
continuum ranging from the most powerful to the least (Gal 1995, Lakoff 1973).
Scholarly work on women and drugs, therefore, often speaks directly against public discourses
that present women’s drug use and incarceration as signs of individual failure and personal weak-
ness. Feminist scholars who study women who commit criminal offenses in relation to drug use
and trafficking have been quick to contextualize these practices within the “structural violence”
from which they emerge (Campbell & Ettore 2011, p. 85). Davis made this point eloquently when
she wrote that black women in prison are often dismissed by mainstream voices who portray their
incarceration as a result of their individual shortcomings. She writes, “Contrary to most available
sources—including those inside prisons and jails—it is not just a series of bad choices that land
black women in prison but a deadly combination of reduced possibilities and extensive police
targeting or public monitoring” (Davis 2000, p. 150).
The result of this emphasis on structural constraints is that it undermines the extent to which
women can be seen as exerting agency. Daly & Maher (1998) refer to this conundrum as the
“intellectual double shift” of research on gender: that is, how to examine gender inequality in real
life while deconstructing the gender ideologies that guide social practices. Miller & Carbone-
Lopez (2015), likewise, remind us that a key facet of feminist scholarship has long been to trace
the relationship between ideological-structural features and practice (see also Connell 2002).
Another aspect of research on the gender of the war on drugs that makes this double challenge
unique is that drug users themselves have been constructed as inherently deprived of agency. As
Bell & Salmon (2010) point out, research on drug use has been consistently criticized by ethicists
and ethics review boards on the assumption that users are unable to give “informed consent” as
research subjects (see Carter & Hall 2008, Cohen 2002). This assumption is particularly strong
regarding women who use drugs, who are considered more deviant and more vulnerable than
men. As a result, many authors have emphasized the “special needs” faced by drug-using women
(Boyd 2001, 2017; Campbell 1999; Ettore 1992).
In short, the research on the gendering of drug use, trafficking, and the war on drugs in
general must confront both the double challenge of examining gender as practiced and as socially
prescribed and constrained while also untangling stereotypes about the lack of power and agency
of people who consume drugs.
324 Muehlmann
CONCLUSIONS
The war on drugs and its ongoing violence have generated a rich and ever-growing body of
literature. Some of this scholarship has exposed that one of the main reasons why this war continues
despite its blatant failure is that it generates skyrocketing profits for the military industrial complex
(Becker 2014), the US and Mexican financial sectors (Gibler 2011), and the government agencies
and corporations (such as private prisons) that profit from inflated budgets to combat drug use
(Paley 2015, Roberts & Chen 2013). Other authors also emphasize the important role of the war
on drugs in the extension and maintenance of racial hierarchies (Diaz-Cotto 2005) and relations of
exploitation between the United States and Latin America (Andreas 2009; Astorga Almanza 2003,
2005; Bertram et al. 1996; Campbell 2009). This line of analysis has been important to expose
the elite beneficiaries of drug war policies and to destabilize commonsense notions that too often
re-entrench neoliberal ideologies, for instance by blaming the victims of violence for using drugs
or allegedly participating in trafficking.
The literature I have reviewed here shows, in turn, that the high levels of violence and grief
created by official policies on drugs in Mexico and the United States disproportionately disrupt
the lives of poor women of color. What the literature on women’s activism also reveals, however,
is that prohibition policies have also been generative of new perceptions about gender relations
and of new affective dispositions such as anger and outrage, in particular (Boyd & Boyd 2014,
Muehlmann 2017, Wright 2014). The growing presence of these women on the political scene
complicates and challenges the official masculinization of violence in the media and reveals the
different ways in which gender positionings constitute the growing opposition against this war
and call for an end to prohibition.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might
be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank the anonymous editors at the Annual Review of Anthropology for their feedback on this
article. I am also grateful for editorial support from Kendra Jewell and Hilary Agro. Finally, I am
particularly thankful for suggestions and advice from Gaston Gordillo.
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Annual Review of Anthropology

The Gender of the War

British Columbia V6T 1A7, Canada; email: shaylih@mail.ubc.ca

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2018. 47:315–30 Keywords

MASCULINITIES AND RACIALIZATION

www.annualreviews.org • The Gender of the War on Drugs 317

GENDERED IDEOLOGIES ON DRUGS AND WOMEN’S ACTIVISM

Gately 2008, Lender & Martin 1987).

www.annualreviews.org • The Gender of the War on Drugs 319

GENDERED DIFFERENCES IN DRUG TRAFFICKING AND USE

www.annualreviews.org • The Gender of the War on Drugs 321

the incarceration rate of black women increased by 82% ( Jordan-Zachery 2008).

THE GENDERING OF STRUCTURE AND AGENCY

www.annualreviews.org • The Gender of the War on Drugs 323

www.annualreviews.org • The Gender of the War on Drugs 325

www.annualreviews.org • The Gender of the War on Drugs 327

Kyvig DE. 1976. Women against prohibition. Am. Q. 28(4):465–82

Lakoff R. 1973. Language and a woman’s place. Lang. Soc. 2(1):45–79

drug markets. J. Drug Issues 37:919–49

www.annualreviews.org • The Gender of the War on Drugs 329

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